The classic Universal Monsters are iconic figures that even a child can recognize, thanks to nearly a century of movies, toys, marketing, cereals and satires. So when it came time to remake The Invisible Man, writer/director Leigh Whannell had his work cut out for him. How do you make a character everybody knows, whose only gimmick is not being seen, a terrifying movie monster in the 21st century?

It’s a tricky question, but as Bloody-Disgusting learned from Whannell in a new interview, one that he almost instinctively knew how to answer.

“The Invisible Man was not something I was pursuing,” Leigh Whannell explained. “It was an idea that was presented to me. I was in a meeting and somebody suggested The Invisible Man, and pretty much instantaneously when they suggested this title a question was proposed, actually, in that meeting. How would YOU do this?”

“And just to fill the air time I was like, well, I would tell the story from the point of view of the victim,” Whannell said.

“It just seemed like the most obvious choice. If you put the villain in the spotlight and make him or her the central character, you demystify them. You don’t want to see the shark in the opening scene of Jaws. You want the unknown. And I just felt like the best tribute I could pay to this character was to make him scary again, in a modern context, and to do that I had to make him mysterious and unknowable. I don’t want to hang out with him. I want him to be terrorizing somebody.”

The original Universal Horror movie The Invisible Man starred Claude Rains as the title villain, and largely took place from his perspective, as a mad scientist with a superpower, eager to wreak havoc upon an unsuspecting world. Whannell’s version takes the opposite approach, and tells the story from the perspective of The Invisible Man’s ex-girlfriend, whom the title monster decides to cruelly stalk, torture and ultimately drive insane.

The new film is a very different approach from H.G. Wells’s original vision, and Whannell knows it.

“I did re-read [the novel], and once I read it I was like, okay, this is a different story, a different framework. I feel like these characters that are iconic, they’re so iconic and so malleable that they plug into anything,” Whannell said. “I mean Dracula and the Wolfman, when I think of them now I think of them in animated films like Hotel Transylvania.”

“They’re so familiar that it dilutes the tension. When these characters were first released they were terrifying. Over the course of time, they’ve almost become comedic. When I think of Frankenstein the first image that pops in my head – it just popped in my head then – is of The Munsters. So that’s what happens when someone becomes so ubiquitous they become safe, and when they become safe they’re not scary anymore,” Whannell said.

“I felt that happening with, say, Freddy Krueger. That first film was terrifying. He was unknowable. He was mysterious. Then by about Part 5 or 6 you’re hanging out with the guy!” Whannell recalls. “I remember that Fat Boys video. And that’s what happens.”

“To be scary we have to be mysterious, and that’s what I needed to do with this character.

“So I read the source material, I’m respectful of it, but I knew I wanted to take it in a very different direction. It wasn’t going to be a character study about a descent into madness, it was going to be a victim of this character,” Whannell said.

Of course, one of the tricks with the Invisible Man is actually filming him. It’s one thing to argue that what the audience doesn’t see is scarier than what they do see, but they still have to look at something. The solution Leigh Whannell settled on was to film the movie as though the Invisible Man was visible, with the camera cutting away to him or panning to the side as though he were in frame. But is he really there? How can we tell?

“I felt like very early on in those first few days when I got the job after that meeting, I quickly locked onto this idea of making empty spaces threatening,” Whannell explains. “And I felt like there was an opportunity here to point the camera at nothing and put the audience on edge. Usually, you’re pointing the camera at something. If it’s a ghost movie you might see a child standing in a corner, if it’s a monster movie you’ll see this monster. But with this movie, the monster is notable by his absence! So I just decided to make the camera autonomous, like it was a character in the film, and it would just drift off down hallways. And that was all really early on in the process that I decided to do that, or to try it at least.”

But that raises the question: if we could see the Invisible Man, would he actually always be there in the frame? How many scenes in The Invisible Man have the Invisible Man in them, without us knowing?

“I know where he is and where he isn’t,” Whannell notes. “I’ll say this, there’s only a couple of instances in the movie where he’s not there when the camera points. Most of the time we’re looking at him, we just don’t know exactly where he is.”

And although Leigh Whannell has extensive experience telling supernatural tales – as the writer and co-star of the blockbuster Insidious franchise – he’s quick to point out that, although The Invisible Man might seem a little like a ghost story, it’s anything but.

“For me what was interesting about this is that it wasn’t a ghost. It’s funny, if you think about the iconic horror monsters – certainly from the Universal stable – there’s this visual iconography about them. Fangs, fur, gills, there’s this stuff. But the Invisible Man is just a human being. That’s what interesting about him. He’s not a vampire, he’s not an alien, he’s just a human, and that’s one of the reasons I could see a way to modernize it,” Whannell explained.

“You know, if you’re dealing with vampires there’s a certain gothic quality that you have to pay attention to but I felt like with the Invisible Man you could make the David Fincher version of that movie. Make a grounded, reality-based film,” Whannell said.

And if the early reviews are any indication, it would seem like that’s just what he did. Find out for yourself when The Invisible Man lurks into theaters this weekend.